Randy Credico: There Is No Need to Put Roger Stone in Prison

Randy Credico was a key witness in the trial against Roger Stone. He was made out by the prosecution as a man fiercely intimidated by Stone – who was charged, among other things, with witness tampering.

I was one of the reporters who interviewed Credico and Stone – and perhaps the only one who wrote factually that Credico said he never was intimidated by Stone.

That was not what the prosecution wanted the jury to hear in the trial that saw Stone convicted of lying to Congress and witness intimidation [Credico].

Stone now faces sentencing in February –and a partisan judge who is going to sentence him in this highly politicized case.

Credico, however, has sent the judge a letter, really a very good letter, and it deserves to be printed here in full.

It not only speaks to the case at hand, the case of Roger Stone, which I have reported on extensively in the past, but it speaks also to the unnecessary and brutal  American vengeance system, more backward than any place in the world, the product of a nation claiming to love freedom where a higher percentage of its people are in prison than anywhere else in the history of the world.

Clearly, there is no need to put Roger Stone in prison. There is an alternative to a cage for a man who represents no danger to society and, in fact, did nothing to harm anyone. The entire charade of Russian collusion was what brought him before Congress and nothing he said impacted anything at all.

In any event, here is what the star witness for the prosecution says about Roger Stone and his upcoming sentencing.

***

January 20, 2020

Randy Credico
New York, New York

The Honorable Amy Berman Jackson
United States District Court for
The District of Columbia
333 Constitution Avenue, NW
Washington D.C. 20001

Dear Judge Jackson,

I am writing to respectfully yet fervently implore you not to send Roger Stone to prison when he is sentenced before your Honor. I feel so strongly about this for a number of reasons.

Let me begin by saying I stand by my testimony in your courtroom on November 7-8, 2019.

In fact, I stand by all of my testimony throughout the Mueller investigation and the pre-trial conversations I had with the DC prosecution team. That being said, there was more that I wish I had the opportunity to express had I not been limited by the questions asked of me.

Most notably was after Mr. Stone’s defense attorney asked if I had ever thought Mr. Stone was going to steal or harm my dog Bianca. My answer was an emphatic “No.” At the time I was hoping he would follow that question with another asking if I had ever personally felt threatened by Mr. Stone. The answer would have been the same. I never in any way felt that Stone himself posed a direct physical threat to me or to my dog. I chalked up his bellicose tirades to “Stone being Stone.” All bark and no bite!

As I said in the courtroom, I met Mr. Stone in 2002 during my organization’s struggle to repeal New York’s racist and Draconian Rockefeller Drug Laws. Stone was an invaluable benefit to the movement. He played a critical role in propelling the movement forward when he convinced his candidate to make the drug law a key issue in the Governor’s race.

That campaign spent millions of dollars focusing on the effects of these harsh and discriminatory laws. After the election Stone continued his commitment to the movement for at least another year. The laws were changed in 2004 and many of those serving ungodly life sentences were released and reunited with their families.

During those years of working to change the Rockefeller Drug Laws and other criminal justice inequities, I visited countless prisoners behind bars and their families. The damage done to the incarcerated is magnified tenfold by the damage done to their family members.

I know this damage firsthand. I am the son of a survivor of the U.S. prison system. My father spent 10 years of his life behind bars before he married and had children. The mental scars of those years never left my father’s soul. As kids, my brother, sister and I could feel the pain radiating from him as though it were our own. As adults, we all struggled with addiction and/ or alcoholism. It has taken a long time to heal those wounds and live a sober life.

I was told that when fashioning a sentence, federal judges look to what is “sufficient, but not greater than necessary” to meet the goals of sentencing. I understand that Roger Stone has broken federal laws, but a prison sentence is beyond what is required in this case. It is not justice. It is cruelty. Indeed, with all of his talent and knowledge, Mr. Stone would be an ideal candidate for participation in an alternative to incarceration program that would serve and benefit needy organizations or distressed communities.

Roger Stone certainly rubs a lot of people the wrong way, particularly those on the receiving end of his wee hour lowbrow character attacks. Stone enjoys playing adolescent mind games and pulling off juvenile stunts, gags and pranks. He shamelessly invents and promotes outlandish and invidious conspiracy tales. But the bottom line is Mr. Stone, at his core, is an insecure person who craves and recklessly pursues attention. Like Billy Wilder’s tragic fictional character Norma Desmond, Stone is always at the ready for that “close-up.”

Prison is no remedy.

When I think of my father and others in prison, I think of these words in a letter written by a tormented Oscar Wilde from his prison cell: “We who live in prison, and in whose lives there is no event but sorrow, have to measure time by throbs of pain, and the record of bitter moments.”

Thank you for your kind consideration of my letter.

Respectfully yours,
Randy Credico

Frank Parlato